It’s happened again, but this time the response has been dynamically altered.

The phrase “Parkland School Massacre” may have entered the tired lexicon of American commentary, but the startling response of a new generation of students is fresh and nationwide.

The shape-shifting ritual of data and rhetorical palliatives began as usual. Even the text messages of kids to their parents from within the school as the gunman roamed the halls feel like déjà vu. Of course, our thoughts and prayers are with the victims. But is that all? Do I sound jaded? Weren’t you?

More Americans die each year from gun violence than in the 10 years of war in Vietnam. Mental health treatment is underfunded. Guns are a cinch to buy, no matter who you are. Even the rehearsal of the stats of NRA political contributions now seems part of a grim, routine rehearsal of the known. Descriptions of the exact effect of AR-15 bullets on human organs sinks into consciousness. Would it help to see the bodies, as we do of atrocities on foreign soil?

We connect the dots, old and new, and then … do nothing. We quibble. Statistics that should be stirring, urgent calls to action just feel routine. The answers, or at least tactics, seem palpable and obvious. The same voices arrive at the same microphones to pontificate. And yet … it’s happened again.

My European friends, whose national flags are small icons on television bar graphs of comparative societal gun violence, look aghast. Jean asked for my thoughts on the most recent “fusillade.” It sounds antiseptic, remote. What’s lost in translation? Do we care more about trade deficits than quality of life deficits? Think education, health care, family leave and civil society. Jean offered me a room in his house. “In France,” he wrote, “it’s difficult to imagine.” Does anyone else feel like becoming a refugee from this insanity? As a high school student as the war in Vietnam ended, I recall political candidates who ran on an “anti-war” platform. It seems they needed only one issue to be viable: ending the war. Bring our troops home. John Kerry asked Congress, “How do you ask someone to be the last person to die in the Vietnam War?” And does the surge of student protest in the wake of Parkland seem reminiscent of anti-Vietnam War protests? It does to me.

Thirty-five years ago, I went into education zealous to teach the great ideas and texts of mankind. Literature, I thought, is the great repository of answers to anguish, terror, inhumanity, ignorance and indifference. Then larger societal issues complicated the teaching and administrative life, little by little. What educator goes into the profession hoping to conduct lockdown and active shooter drills? Customary fire drills seem quaint. Installing deft-shooter teachers — “hardening our schools” — seems asymmetrical to the threat, and to our implied Socratic oaths as educators. Teachers pack ideas, not guns. Ideas never miss their intended targets.

Bereft school superintendents or principals, thrust before the glaring cameras of the next media swarm, parrot the politicians’ talking points. The anguished, childless parent endures unimaginable grief, rage and reoriented purpose. What of their hearts and minds? Harden them too?

After all the plagues had escaped Pandora’s box to torment mankind, there at the bottom was hope — which feels fraught today. To have any meaning, it cannot languish in passivity. Without courage, resolve, and focus, hope starts to feel like indifference — a mere bromide.

Indifference. Now there’s a real scourge. In how many societal cross-currents right do we find ourselves abandoning the common good: poverty, attacks on civil rights, equitable spending of the vast cultural, natural and manufactured wealth we enjoy as Americans? How about telling the truth?

The potential antidote seems obvious: at least control the assault weapons. The children in Parkland, Fla., and across the country — the generation raised in post-Columbine schools — ask the adults to act. Protect children, not guns. Who would like to be the political candidate running on an anti-war-on-children campaign? How do you ask someone to be the last child shot in a fusillade at their public school?

Get the children off the frontlines in this undeclared war. Or, rather — children, we’ve failed you. You’re reminding us exactly where the frontlines are, or ought to be. Your voices arefresh, new and restorative. Send in the new anti-war candidates. Perhaps they’re already here. That’s my hope.

One summer, just before the start of school, I heard an Ohio Amish farmer quoted on National Public Radio: “A farming community is only as good as its soil,” he said. And a farm makes an apt metaphor for the community of teaching, learning, and parenting we find in schools, though our seasons are backwards: fall is planting time; spring is harvest.

It’s pleasing to imagine a school’s diverse intelligence and abundant resources as a farm. The library serves as the orchard of perennial Macintoshes, Cortlands and Red Delicious. Yonder is the wood lot, our source of both axe handles and heat, and the economy of being twice warmed from each log. The classrooms of rich river-bottom land and meadows support both the whimsy of wild flowers and milkweed beloved of Monarch butterflies, and income-producing barley or wheat. Ours are free-range chickens, but not free-range cattle. The neighbors aren’t too irate when an occasional bull wanders into the rhubarb, as long as we don’t allow it too often. We maintain the fences because ‘Good fences make…”—you know the rest. And there is even aspiration to raise an occasional exotic crop: Perhaps this is the year for shitake mushrooms or raspberries for local restaurants. And we take care to sow cover crops to assure the replenishment of nitrogen in the soil.

But ah, that rich soil of ours, enabling this balance and diversity. To be a successful farm or school, we must nurture that which nurtures us—we’re only as good as our soil, after all. Maintaining the soil is as important as the price we get at market for a bushel of our corn. We are not interested in mere short-term production, but in stewardship of the land, developing both orchard and cash crop. After all, we want to pass the farm down to generation “next.” This is sustainable farming. And, as the Amish farmer knows, the success of the individual farmer cannot be detached from the surrounding community. We gotta share tools, chores, and resources. I’ll plow your north forty ‘cause I have a tractor; you’ll let my cows graze your high meadow.

Stewardship of a learning community requires intimate knowledge of its climate and soil. Schooling, like farming, is an intensely local enterprise. My favorite poet and farmer is Wendell Berry of Eastern Kentucky. “The particular farm,” he writes, “must not be treated as any farm…. Farming by the measure of… the nature of the particular place means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love. . . . The inability to distinguish between a farm and any farm is a condition predisposing to abuse.” When I first read these thoughts I was struck by how parallel they are with the qualities of robust schools. It emphasizes the strength of progressive schooling to substitute the word “school” for “farm” in these sentences.

Then we must wonder, what is the soil of this school community? I know what it is not: mere class size, physical facilities, or technology. These are our distinguishing features, our tools. Nor should soil and crops be confused. We raise up proficiency in a foreign language, literacy, numeracy, artistic and athletic expression; ethical judgment and the grace of collaboration. But I suggest that our soil is something deeper. The achievement of a healthy community is its guidance of children toward maturity and fulfillment, the protection of opportunities for men and women to continue learning in the practice of their craft, the use of equitable systems for self-evaluation, judgment, and evolution.

A true community is self-perpetuating and self-healing because it springs from such vitality as the knowledge and love of the farmer. A faculty should be given an economy of scale that allows for the use of “tools they know and love, in the company of neighbors they know and love.” We village elders have responsibilities towards raising all of the children by passing on the traditional lore and craft that return that good crop-growing nitrogen to the soil of knowledge and love. A school community too is only as good as its soil. This is sustainable learning.

Today’s children inhabit a very different landscape than their parents or teachers. As they begin to anticipate their own manhood or womanhood, they must make sense of some very confusing messages, one of which is the current seemingly benign aspiration to have the authority of adulthood without the critical balance of experience and maturity; to have the behaviors of mature people without the commensurate habits of thought and feeling required to genuinely inhabit an adult life. This makes for shallow roots—rapid growth, for instance, but lacking durability. Currently our media exalts images of unearned power and prestige and corruptions of authentic virtue: luck over blessedness, savvy over wisdom, stoicism over bravery. Which leads me to feel that a community of learning is a wonderful place to spend these chrysalis years, not an escape, but a sturdy structure from which to venture forward. But the privilege of membership incurs a responsibility.

We must teach that it is in the best interest of each individual to live in a way that enriches the communal soil. “If we were lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who loved us,” Berry notes, “then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness-in-ourselves, but is the sense also of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having-in-common.” Community is the meeting ground of the past and the future, where one is nourished by the other through a sense of belonging, and a life of learning that is habitual, thus deeply rooted for long-term, abundant productivity. Schools should be producing human beings whose hearts and intellect are integrated with contemporary tools, intelligences, and peoples. Thus we “hitch our wagon to a star.” It takes all of us to make the journey. The soil of learning is the soil of community. One might also say, “Welcome to the barn raising, neighbors.”[1]

I got married wearing a kilt. It was made in the Gunn tartan: green, blue, black and a blood red pinstripe. Gunn may not sound too Scottish, because the Nelsons apparently descended from Norse people, perhaps Viking invaders many eons ago. I am also a member of a clan of a different ilk, the nationwide progressive schools community. I descend directly from the influence of John Dewey, Whitehead, Francis Parker. And the Nelson band of Lesley and Todd and their three kids has lived in urban, suburban, and rural environments, including small towns that depend on volunteers to put out fires, staff the ambulance corps, and grant precious harbor moorings in a small Maine harbor. I changed schools this summer and am now hoping to be inducted into the Ridley Creek Tribe of Rose Valley learners, which may be where all of my affiliations intersect: kilt, progressive classroom, mooring, and bamboo forts or May fair dances.

I do have a point: Imagine the number of clans, tribes, and bands comprising any school community—including the ingenious interpretations of this concept that each child might arrive at. The block corner clan; the dress-up corner band; the tribe of button sorters in the kindergarten; the adult learning community. There are subtle shades of meaning to each kind of human collective.

Which is to say that we all blend in intentional and unintentional, chosen, inherited or happenstance communities, clans, tribes, and bands. We are each a product of the unique warp and weft of location, values, and history. Each of us comes from near and far in time and distance. Within five generations on just one side of my clan, I descend from a farmer, a carpenter, a journalist, a tool and die maker, and an accountant. My kids will have to add an educator to their list. I can’t wait to see what their kids add.

I’ve come to feel that community is, in fact, always intentional. It is the choice we make to join together, share habitation in a particular place and time, or congregate along an intellectual or artistic vein of experience. If the world is now flat (Thomas Friedman), then a certain sense of community can reach farther, faster than ever before—if that is our intent.

And yet… does the sense of “online community” have the same satisfying texture as throwing our voices over the backyard fence, shoveling driveways, or fighting fires together? Authentic communities share a stake in a particular place. Without some core allegiance or devotion we’re left with mere occupancy, or land use without stewardship. Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet, locates healthy childhood in such a core: “If we were lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who loved us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness-in-ourselves, but is the sense also of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having-in-common.” We are moored in such having-in-common, and it is something to be cherished and amplified. The world needs more of it!

Contemporary lives may not exactly intersect in the same commonalities as in former times—think: farming communities in which everyone depends on the quality of local soil, and one family’s barn gets raised through communal effort—but schools provide us with perhaps the last vestige of just such a community and calendar. A chance conversation with a parent reminded me of this. “I love May Fair,” he was saying, exiting a classroom last spring, in full preparation for the next day’s dances and games. “There’s nothing like it.” We spoke of the celebration as a throwback.

Indeed. What other institution in society still functions on an agrarian cycle, has profound rituals and rites of passage that celebrate seasons, planting and reaping times, where the whole community gathers to celebrate itself, as itself? It’s not something that lends itself to on-line community. There’s simply no other way to have the texture and grace of the May pole dance. It is an heirloom rhythm and celebration, to be sure, but consider how much it is still something for which people hunger. Which means school communities like ours have something important to say to the future as well—to our clan, tribe, band, or community as it will exist downstream from our time.[1]

]]>https://reversingfalls.me/2017/07/06/clan-tribe-band-community/feed/0trn1956From Bad to Verse: How Poetry Ruined my Lifehttps://reversingfalls.me/2017/06/22/from-bad-to-verse-how-poetry-ruined-my-life/
https://reversingfalls.me/2017/06/22/from-bad-to-verse-how-poetry-ruined-my-life/#respondThu, 22 Jun 2017 20:30:30 +0000http://reversingfalls.me/?p=277Continue reading →]]>As I was young and easy, my childhood was ruined by beautiful writing and high-minded values and verbal expression, and I blame it all on poetry. For years, my parents left this dangerous, unstable writing lying around the house in plain sight. It was, alas, the era before parent advisory labels. Mom and dad left poems where unsuspecting children could find them. For birthday cards, there were poetic quotes. For the solution to every torment, from mere doldrums of summer to heartbreak and adolescent angst, there were quotes from poems.

My early years were imbued with the sense that language was the most precious thing in the world; that putting the right words in the right order was a virtuous life work; that finding power, and style, and beauty in language was the highest calling—all telegraphed to us kids by poems taped on the fridge and liberal quoting of verse. Poetry, it was clear, was the fount of wisdom, insight, and memorable, gorgeous expression. Even today, when I pluck a few, cherished anthologies from my shelf, it starts a flood of memory and feeling. Deeply embedded lines come to the fore like old acquaintances.

I still have the Leaves of Grass that dad gave me for Christmas in ninth grade. “Whitman loved much that you love—beauty, openness, honesty, freedom, nature. Inside here is his “Song of the Open Road.” You are entering your open road years. Demand much of them; give them fully of yourself and you will have come to terms with being.”

Dad felt obliged to convey pathos and meaning at every opportunity. How about a new bicycle for Christmas? Nope. But I bet I can now find a poem about it. By 12th grade, I only wanted one thing for Christmas: The Complete Poems of e.e. cummings. Powerful words and emotions had infected my soul.

My paperback copy of Oscar Williams Pocket Book of Modern Verse was a constant companion for two years of high school English. It’s here on my shelf. Mr. Walker gave excruciatingly precise tests of memory based on that book. I still recall hours of poring over titles and poets, ready to identify any snippet of verse for tests covering 40 poems—the power of the poems, the power of recollecting them. Phrases from “Walker poems” still come to mind: “A poem should not mean but be,” “Imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” “had anything been wrong we would certainly have heard.” There. I’ve shared a poetry scavenger hunt.

Try taking a walk in the woods without Wordsworth or Frost accompanying you! The woods are always ‘lovely, dark and deep”—Oooo that comma! Try taking in a winter landscape without hearing in the sound of the wind “the nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.” There’s always a certain “slant of light” that must be appreciated or described. It makes the world a word-scape ripe for shaping and appreciation beyond the prosaic.

Inside the tent of poetry (metaphor alert!) I found a world of imagination (“’Twas brillig”), nature’s beauty (My senior yearbook quote: “Gie me a’ the spark o’ nature’s fire, that’s a’ the learnin’ I desire,”), and even environmentalism (“It is only a little planet, but oh how beautiful it is”). Poetry had an answer for everything, and beckoned to “a helluva good universe next door: let’s go.” It gauged human psyche and history and potential, all in cadence and rhyme: “We fray into the future, rarely wrought save in the tapestries of afterthought.”

The pernicious influence of an even greater range of poets was cemented in place in college: I was an English major. I read the old and middle English, Shakespearian, Romantic, Victorian, and modern British and American poets before settling on T.S. Eliot for my thesis topic. Senior year was “Four Quartets.” And what does one do with a B.A. in English? Teach poetry, of course. So I did.

Now my bookshelves groan with anthologies of all kinds. I can locate a poem on any theme—from running to golf to automobiles; guitar riffs to swimming lessons; geometry to thermodynamics; ants to Zulus. Nothing exceeds the grasp of the poetic imagination. Everything good, lasting, meaningful can be found in a poem.

In my professional life, I once had the privilege of interviewing Billy Collins, U.S. poet laureate. “Poetry is the result,” he said, “of taking an obsessive interest in language and finding that using language in a certain way can express what otherwise cannot be expressed. The history of poetry is the only surviving history we have of human emotion. It is the history of the human heart. There is no other one. Without poetry, we would be deprived of the emotional companionship of our ancestors.” No pressure, Billy.

There is now no walk for me that is not Thoreauvian; no day not filled with metaphor; no moment not experienced metaphysically or transcendentally, “beauty and truth, truth beauty,” everywhere. I cannot see “a certain slant of light,” or hear the winter wind without “hearing the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”—the world is words. The “Little lame balloon man” augurs spring for me. The poet is the “priest of the invisible,” or an alien from inner space. “Poetry is the bill and coo of sex,” saith the poet. Erotica! It is a burden to be so dominated by great writing. Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be English majors, though they will “come to terms with being”—like that’ll pay the bills.

My kids have been affected too, receiving poems as birthday letters or sundry quote barrages. “Happy birthday, honey. Have I sent you this one by Wendell Berry, recently? William Stafford! Sharon Olds! Naomi Shihab Nye” The word, the word, the word. Always gotta quote; share something pithy and succinct; passing along meaning, and feeling, and beautiful expression in other people’s words. It’s not enough to merely state a point—it must always have maximum possible resonance. Emotional companionship indeed. Yup, poetry made me the pitiful, empathic, romantic, Keatsian, truth-seeking, beauty-seeking, beatnik, transcendental, articulate man I am today—such as I was, such as I would become. “Horseman pass by.”

]]>https://reversingfalls.me/2017/06/22/from-bad-to-verse-how-poetry-ruined-my-life/feed/0trn1956The Two Hour Dragonhttps://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/28/the-two-hour-dragon/
https://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/28/the-two-hour-dragon/#respondSat, 28 Jan 2017 14:56:49 +0000http://reversingfalls.me/?p=275Continue reading →]]>It’s a good title for a children’s story, don’t you think? It would go something like this…

One morning at school, the art teacher passed the word: “The dragon just might be ready by this afternoon.”

As every good school knows, dragon parade opportunities come but once a year: Chinese New Year in February. It’s the year of the rooster. Gung hay fat chow, is the traditional new year chant. Therefore one must ‘seize the day.’ Any opportunity for exuberant, spontaneous winter parades, complete with cymbals, bells, tambourines, drums, kazoos, and thirty feet of cloth disguising 64 children, combined with freak warmth and sunshine in February in a northern New England coastal town (despite warnings of an impending storm), are rare.

It seemed obvious what to do: start the second and third graders gluing colored paper to the big cardboard boxes the teachers had been saving. Styrofoam packing material could be turned into horns, jaws, and enormous eyebrows. CDs make terrific shiny eyes. And tattered fabric can be turned into a shaggy mane in minutes by the fourth graders. Ten yards of bargain red and gold Chinese fabric took care of the body.

It almost didn’t fit out of the door of the art room. “Try the window,” suggested the kids. The tape measure said that the window didn’t buy more than an inch and a half. “Maybe if we turn it on its side and lever the jaws out first?” It worked.

Gotta make noise. Music closet—Huzzah! Instant band. We’re ready. Who’ll be inside the dragon head? Eighth graders, by virtue of seniority and stamina and superior dragon-dancing skills and height. Put 32 pairs of legs, from short to long, under the dragon tale; distribute noisy percussion instruments to the other 32 pairs. “I can’t hear you”—how often does a principal ask for more noise? Now, walk this way.

When he was poet laureate, Billy Collins created “Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry.” It’s an anthology of “contemporary poems,” enough for one on each school day (with a few to spare, in our case). His goal was to freshen up the perception of poetry by collecting new voices and varied topics, have poems simply read aloud without comment at the beginning of a school day. No point in extracting a confession from them as to deep inner meaning, but just let the topics and words and nuanced feelings flow over us, a trickle-down effect of fresh words. Listen to the sound of myriad voices. Tune into perspectives and insights that prose (or texting or Facebook or Snapchat) does not give us.

In an interview at the time of its inception, Collins said, “We are all kind of natural poets as children. We all like rhyming and clapping and basic musical and rhythmic delights that support poetry. But when we get to high school, poetry becomes just another subject. It becomes like trigonometry — harder than trigonometry. At least with trigonometry you have a hope of getting the answer! With poetry the answer often seems to be a kind of mystery that only the teacher knows.” It’s that academic sense of poetry that needs a refresh. So “Poetry 180” opens up the ears of a new generation that does not have a sense of the Anglo-American canon, the oral tradition in literature, nor academic trafficking in deep inner meaning — opens up to dynamic language, a diet of intrigue, insight, bemusement and new perspectives. Where does this meet the road for my seventh- and eighth-grade language arts students? So far, they’ve started a list of favorites, read poems about swimming, sentimental song prompts, “the pink car,” acting class, telephone calls, infatuation, favorite outfits, the loss of a colleague, space heaters, numbers, lines, dogs fetching snowballs, salt … and poems themselves. But of course every poem is about itself.

Any other poetry alive in our schoolhouse? The third- and fourth-graders do a poem a week, and read it to the kindergartners. “You get to read to the younger kids and every time you read to them they like what you’re doing,” Ella reported. “It’s something that you read to them, but you don’t sing to them,” said Garrett. “We did one of our own poems last year.”

“What is poetry anyway?” I asked. “We get funny poems and we get to read them,” Garrett said. “Usually poems rhyme and they’re about something.” Like colors, climbing a tree, haiku — anything. There are favorites. “Ladies and jellyspoons,” comes to mind. “Colors,” and “If my dog could talk.” Billy Collins would be impressed. “Poetry is the only surviving history we have of human emotion,” he says, “ … the emotional companionship of our ancestors.” And, evidently, their pets. Every day’s a poetry slam dunk, or ought to be.

]]>https://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/a-poem-a-day/feed/0trn1956Writing is a Bearhttps://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/writing-is-a-bear/
https://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/writing-is-a-bear/#respondWed, 11 Jan 2017 21:30:42 +0000http://reversingfalls.me/?p=271Continue reading →]]>…as Discussed in 8th Grade ELA after an example by John McPhee

“You see, even if you don’t like to write you have a handy topic: writer’s block itself. You could start out with a letter, like John McPhee advises. ‘Dear Mr. Nelson,’ you might say, ‘I do not like to write! I have such a hard time thinking of a topic. This assignment is a total bear.’ And you could go on and on saying why, and what it feels like to have no ideas and feel blocked and stymied, whining about how useless it feels. ‘It’s like strolling through the woods, minding your own business,’ you could write, ‘when you round a corner and you startle a bear. He comes thrashing through the bushes to investigate.’ This bear-writing assignment does not like surprises and he’s big and hungry. So he starts moving towards you with a famished look in his eyes. And you must decide, shall I run for it? But then you think better of that option since the bear is going to out run you. I’ll climb a tree! Silly. Bears are better tree climbers too. Play dead? You’re ticklish. Wouldn’t last long. And here his big furry self comes, heading straight towards your lunch bag, which his big black nose has detected, licking his lips and no doubt thinking, Easy pickings, this one. So now you’re down to your last option which is to look the bear in the eye and prepare to stand your ground and out-fierce him—and you do—until finally you are toe-to-toe, breathing his hot stinky bear-about-to-hibernate breathe, thinking, My, what big teeth you have. And the bear is thinking, I am so misunderstood. All I wanted was a morsel of that peanut butter and honey sandwich that smells so heavenly. And you wonder, Perhaps he would settle for my PBH sandwich. So you pull it out of the bag slowly and offer it on the palm of your hand, and the bear sniffs it and decides that it seems like a very fair deal and involves far less effort than picking your own berries, one by one, or invading a bee hive and stealing honey from little buzzing things that sting. And so the deal is silently struck, and the bear gets lunch and you get your writing assignment done. You take John McPhee’s advice and just remove ‘Dear Mr. Nelson’ from the page and retitle it ‘My Lunch with the Bear.’” Sometimes the bear eats you (or your sandwich), and sometimes you eat the bear (or, the assignment). Now you’re thinking, I wonder if that bear hascubs?

]]>https://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/writing-is-a-bear/feed/0trn1956Green Man Dayhttps://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/green-man-day/
https://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/green-man-day/#respondWed, 11 Jan 2017 21:30:02 +0000http://reversingfalls.me/?p=269Continue reading →]]>I can still recall it with clarity and joy: the sunny day in May of seventh grade that altered my life. Personal history for me is divided between Before or After Green Man Day—the day when Jimmy Butler and I painted our faces green at the 7th grade Arts festival. What were we thinking? What could possibly have inspired us? Who knows. But it did.

First of all, it was an astoundingly vibrant and unusual day of school. All the regular classes were replaced with special arts activities. We weren’t even using the usual Junior High School facility, but an alternative location that had a studio or workshop feel to it. We were making things, painting things, constructing and collaging and weaving things; doing things. It was a day when there was a skill and behavior inversion: the kids who sat at the back of the room and were quiet, those who learned better with their hands, became more vocal and active and vital. The kids who always had their hands in the air with the right answer to the teacher-posed questions were slightly off balance. Suddenly, all the multiple intelligences, instead of just the customary book-learnin’ ones, were in bold relief. And this was about twenty years before anyone was even talking about different kinds of intelligence. And there we were, Jimmy Butler and me standing at the paint table wondering what to do with our hands…sounding our “barbaric yawp,” awaiting inspiration or mischief, whichever came first. Sometimes there’s such a fine line between the two.

It must have followed some sort of “I-will-if-you-will” dare, or Double Dog Dare. We both would; we both did. We both went Green. It signified independence and autonomy, and certainly a loss of inhibition. It was about the numerous intangibles of youth…those moments when we discover our own voice, make an independent choice, select a fresh character to play. It’s tentative risk taking; it’s forging identity separate from peers and parents and external expectations. Perhaps it was the onset of my recognition that the academic curricula come and go; the broader work of finding identity and establishing a sense of possibility for our lives is the long-term study.

It’s also simply great, sticky, gooey, glorious fun: paint smells good, feels good, and attracts attention when it appears in unexpected places. Like covering your face. Soon I would have a rock and roll garage band and drumming took the place of green face—but it was the same idea. The green paint washed off, after a very effective surprise moment for mom when I got off the school bus. But clearly, the new tint of personal legend has lingered. And, as I recall, it led shortly thereafter to a purple shirt and chartreuse bellbottoms that I wore with pride to the first day of school in 8th grade. It was a delightfully slippery slope.

]]>https://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/green-man-day/feed/0trn1956The Great Bookshttps://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/the-great-books/
https://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/the-great-books/#respondWed, 11 Jan 2017 21:29:29 +0000http://reversingfalls.me/?p=267Continue reading →]]>Epic literature comes in unexpected packages. We forget that all the rules of the greatest books also apply to children’s literature, so-called…and that children need great literature.

“Children need art and stories and poems and music as much as they need love and food and fresh air and play,” says Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass trilogy, an epic tale that straddles literary boundaries. Remember another journeyer, Max, in Where the Wild Things Are? He is an Odysseus and the journey from home to foreign lands and back to a restored kingdom matches all the trials and triumphs of Homer’s epic poem.

Stories deliver us to ourselves—sometimes to neglected or undetected parts of ourselves. The other day, I shared a couple of my favorite Great Books with 8th graders. I read them Not a Box, and Weslandia, two deceptively simple stories with epic themes: respecting your imagination, and following your unique path of exploration and individuality. They were intended as prompts for my 8th graders, working on their own epic literature, short autobiographical squibs they were posting on a special bulletin board. Reading great books, however simple, begets great writing, unleashing the imagination to inhabit memories of the inventive moments, playful scenes, and pathway choices to our own worlds of ingenuity and creativity.

Sometimes this is thinking inside the box—a cardboard box. It is making a rocket ship, an apartment building, a robot, ship or hot air balloon gondola from humble materials. Creativity is making adaptations, new things, solutions and fresh possibilities. “If you don’t give a child art and stories and poems and music,” says Pullman, “the damage is not so easy to see. It’s there, though. Their bodies are healthy enough; they can run and jump and swim and eat hungrily and make lots of noise, as children have always done, but something is missing.” The mind needs nourishing stories.

]]>https://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/the-great-books/feed/0trn1956Reading about Readinghttps://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/reading-about-reading/
https://reversingfalls.me/2017/01/11/reading-about-reading/#respondWed, 11 Jan 2017 21:28:44 +0000http://reversingfalls.me/?p=265Continue reading →]]>In David Denby’s recent book, Lit Up, the New Yorker magazine writer embeds himself with several quite varied American high schools in order to explore the state of reading and teaching literature at the secondary level. A few items caught my attention as they affect the middle level and the “onramp” to secondary school language arts or English.

Mamaroneck High School (New York), for instance, adopted a program they hoped would create “a culture of reading.” Simply put, reading begets more reading. It’s kind of a volume discount proposition: The more you read, the more you want to read…and the more depth and quality you will demand of your reading. We can’t avoid yearning for better quality prose, and more satisfying plots and characters, in storytelling. “Mamaroneck wanted to build a kind of reading ego: having chosen a book on their own, the students took control of it and enjoyed pride of ownership, a very American idea.” The school simply set aside time and resources to encourage reading of any kind. To break it down a little further, they knew reading is propelled by enjoyment, and enjoyment is propelled by choice. In the case of high school students, “awakened by pride as well as interest, they might be roused from electronic stupor,” their absorption in the allure of social media being the ostensible enemy. At Mamaroneck, everyone got involved. Teachers and students alike posted their current reading choices; shared views and reviews; got involved in one another’s book interests. Reading took off. The quality of those choices eventually took care of itself.

Is writing the same? Newspapers used to pay writers by the column inch. And does all that texting going on today count as writing? If so, your pay packet is going to suffer! Would a useful gambit be to simply reward word count not sophistication, like we do adding up books read? My second grader, Oliver, wrote a recent tree frog story. There was six feet of it, which got me thinking of the possible rewards of the column inch approach.

As human beings, we are, after all, the storytelling species. We should not let our love of narrative be displaced by the ease of data or mere information. We need to read to ourselves, tell ourselves the story of where we’ve been, wrestle with angels and devils and tree frogs, and then dream. It improves the quality of the stories we will tell of where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, and what it felt like to journey there. Read on. What might these 436 words be worth?